lomg line
Claire Keane
Today's Document

pixel skylines

shark vs the universe

#extradirty

Kaledo Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
noise dept.
Show & Tell
Peter Solarz

ellievsbear

Product Placement
Not today Justin

No title available

⁂
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Monterey Bay Aquarium

if i look back, i am lost
Mike Driver
Sweet Seals For You, Always

seen from Argentina
seen from Philippines

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Singapore

seen from United States
seen from Australia

seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia

seen from Poland

seen from China
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Philippines

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Sweden
@math-goth
lomg line
Dark energy makes the whole universe expand faster and faster! But what causes this spectacular process? Join NASA’s newest citizen science project, Dark Energy Explorers, and help figure out this puzzle.
At Dark Energy Explorers, you’ll look through images of distant galaxies and other data to help build a map of the universe, focusing on the region about 10 billion light years away. The images come from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment, based at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory. Various explanations for dark energy predict different changes in the expansion rate.
Those changes will affect the map in different ways—so your work will help astrophysicists use the map to sort through the possibilities.
Continue Reading
I attended a march to stop Cop City. Rarely have I felt so safe in a crowd. Between 300-400 people in masks, hoodies, with shields and banners, chanted in unison “we are unstoppable, another world is possible” and “viva, viva, tortuguita.”
Calmly, we approached the southern power line cut in the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. We marched toward the police, located on the far northern gate. Along the way, many people ripped up countless meters of silt fencing, the first phase of “pre-construction” carried out for Cop City. This work was conducted by Brent Scarborough Company on behalf of Brasfield & Gorrie. When we reached the police, they scattered. The crowd destroyed all of their equipment with ease and confidence, including their operations trailer, their floodlights, their vehicles. This act of mass collective sabotage was done methodically and without anxiety. Some individuals were heroically repelling police who approached the gate, which gave the rest of us the space we needed to take the time we needed to accomplish our goals.
The crowd left the area together after completing the sabotage. Nobody was arrested for taking part in this action, despite what media reports and police press conferences might lead you to believe.
An hour later, the police attacked Weelaunee People’s Park. They attacked a music festival taking place as a part of the week of action. The agencies responsible for the attack on the festival were the Georgia State Patrol, the FBI, the GBI, APD, Sandy Springs PD, and the Department of Natural Resources. The festival was at least one mile from the location of the sabotage. The festival was attended by over 1,000 people the day before, and hundreds were still pouring into the area for the second day.
After police attacked some concert-goers, multiple small groups worked to repel them from the parking lot area. In the distance, I could still hear the sounds of fireworks exploding. I had been saved by someone who was shooting fireworks at the police on the bicycle path. The State Patrol fired tear gas at us. They were shooting us with pepper balls. All around me, random people were de-arresting one another, throwing stones, and running into the woods. I do not know who they were. I do not know their identity, their language, their ethnicity, their gender. I cannot judge them by any of those. I cannot know if we were friends, if we would be friends. I do not know if they are the kind of people I would spend time with. I can only judge them by their actions. In that sense, they were heroes. Many, many people escaped arrest or helped others to escape.
Around 7:30pm, I was belly-down, hiding beneath the brush. I was dripping with sweat, covered in scratches. A drone hovered above me. A helicopter circled above the drone. I could hear search dogs across the river in the Prison Farm.
I thought I was going to be captured. I did not panic, but I was close to it. And then I heard the music. It was quiet where I was, but I heard it. It made me cry. I was scared, and I was grateful, and I was inspired.
The music festival had not been cancelled. I didn’t know it at the time, but the bands did not stop playing, even when police pointed rifles at them, even when they brought an armored truck into the RC field. When police approached the festival, still over 100 people, they all linked arms. They demanded to be allowed to leave. They won.
I spent almost two hours trying to escape the forest. I wish I had been at the music festival. I wish I had not been separated from the people who had saved me, the anonymous people in masks who were throwing stones and helping people who had fallen to the ground in a panic. Next time, I will try harder to stay with the crowd. Next time, I will stick with the rock throwers, or, if I am given the chance, the dancers, the mothers, the DJs.
I have to say this somewhere. It's killing me.
The fact that so many STEM bros think ChatGPT is a good writer demonstrates the need for more comprehensive literature education. Beyond the fact that it confidently writes essays that are factually incorrect, it is just not a substitute for someone who is actually a good lyricist or poet or essayist.
Listening to STEM people say "this could replace copy writers" just proves that they don't actually read copy.
All ChatGPT born after 1993 can’t write. All they do is use GPU, incorrectly format latex, and lie (about math).
Calculus may have its roots in indigeneity. Let me explain.
David Graeber's the Dawn of Everything is a beautiful exposition of all we know of pre-history that challenges every preconceived notion we have about pre-history, even why we call it pre-history. Our modern society systematically devalues oral history, and the scientific method has becomes a violence placed on indigenous, black, and brown epistemologies and ontologies. Black residents living around polluted watersheds, for example, have known for two or three generations that the fish and their loved ones are dying of cancer. The scientific method becomes the epistemological battering ram used by industry and the power companies to devalue these narratives. Similarly, as is in Graeber's book, first-hand source material from interactions between French Jesuits and Wendat people in the French colonies of Quebec has been historically interpreted in a way that disavows the rhetorical prowess of Wendat and Iriqoui orators. Thus, these historians devalue any ontology outside of the rationality of modernity. Historians examining this subject assume that there is no way that indigenous people could have formulated similar philosophical constructs as Europeans. One of these orators is named Kondiaronk. But how does this relate to Calculus and Mathematics?
Every mathematician or math undergraduate knows about the struggle over the attribution of authorship about who discovered Calculus. Leibniz published his work on Calculus first, and Newton's followers accused him of plagiarism. Gottfried Leibniz began working on calculus in 1674 and, in 1684 published his first paper, "Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis." The historical feud that ensued is the stuff of legends.
There is a kernel of indigenous thought in Calculus because Graeber mentions that Kandiorok was friends with Gottfried Leibniz in The Dawn of Everything. And Leibniz had many contacts with more of these European Indigenous orators trying to broker peace between the colonies and the Wendat. Graeber's core argument is that the European enlightenment resulted from conversations with indigenous orators criticizing the French system of private property. Some source material that suggests the dialogues with figures like Kaniorock are not fictions of the European imagination are letters from Leibniz in which he treats the indigenous critiques as real arguments from entirely rational humans.
"Explanation of the binary arithmetic, which uses only the characters 1 and 0, with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figures of Fu Xi" (1703), Leibniz stated: "What is amazing in this reckoning is that this arithmetic by 0 and 1 is found to contain the mystery of the lines of an ancient King and philosopher named Fuxi, who is believed to have lived more than 4000 years ago, and whom the Chinese regard as the founder of their empire and their sciences. There are several linear figures attributed to him, all of which come back to this arithmetic …" [1]
Ideas of rates of change and infinitesimals could have roots in conversations with Indigenous orators. To assume they didn't fall into the same fallacious thinking that recreates scientific ontological violence. Leibniz drew inspiration for math from outside of Europe and had contact with Indigenous orators like Kondiaronk [2]. It might be reasonable to reexamine the feud by assuming Leibniz first discovered calculus through conversations with Indigenous orators and politicians. If there is a chance that calculus came from indigenous roots and not Europeans, it is the responsibility of mathematicians to change this narrative.
.
[1]Leibniz, W. 1703. Die mathematische schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. VII. Memoires de l’Academie Royale des Sciences. Gerhardt, C. I. (Ed.), 223–227, 225. Translated from the French; http://www.leibniz-translations.com/binary.htm
[2]https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2022/02/historiography-in-the-dawn-of-everything-pt-2.html
“I once had ChatGPT insist that a particular composer wrote music for a game, even going so far as to list particular songs from the soundtrack that they were supposedly responsible for, and it helpfully provided hallucinatory citations when I asked for them (a broken link on the game publisher’s website and a link to Wikipedia, which did not in fact support its assertion either now or at any point in the article’s history). Nor could I find anywhere else on the internet where someone even mistakenly believed that that composer had worked on the game. ChatGPT lies not because it’s regurgitating falsehoods that it found on the internet - it lies because it invents new falsehoods on its own. It’s not just trained on stuff on the internet that’s wrong; it’s trained to be confidently wrong in general. It doesn’t know what facts are, it just knows how to produce things that are shaped like facts and shove them in fact-shaped holes. I personally wasted 30 minutes of my life fact-checking/“not believing everything it says”, when it confidently told me something surprising. My horizons were not broadened by exposing me to “different worldviews”. This was unequivocally a negative experience for me.”
— comment on a MetaFilter post about AI: “My goal is to be helpful, harmless, and honest.”
Also, the whole research discipline that propduced this technology desires to create an AI that can fool a human into thinking it’s another human. With that end goal, is it any surprise that chatbots fill in the unknowns with the most probable nonsense?
The idea that chatGPT is AGI is the definition of irrational exuberance.
Nassim Taleb’s criticism of Karl Marx in Black Swan is that Marx was a crypto-frequentist statistician. Just when you thought you heard it all. LoL
Real question: what’s up with the AI bros?
Why are people so ideologically invested in AGI?
AGI may or may not be an empirically verifiable phenomenon. I just don’t get the passion in these debates.
What is wrong with being an animal? I have believed that the animal world is cruel and violent since I was a child, and I am currently unpacking these beliefs. Not all societies believe that the animal world is less than the human one. Surveying people in our current world likely would tell us that most people think that the animal world is cruel and animals live as houseless wretches in constant want of shelter.
The idea of animality is central to "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason," a book by Michel Foucault that explores the relationship between madness, Reason, and society in Western culture. The book traces the evolution of attitudes towards madness from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, showing how the treatment of the insane changed over time. And I am writing my thoughts on this book after reading it as a record to myself.
In the Middle Ages, madness was a form of spiritual deficiency, and those who suffered from it were put on boats, exiled, or exorcised. Paintings, like Heroinius Bosh's Ship of Fools, chronicle this phenomenon. During the transition to modernity, madpeople took on the moral standing that the leapers did during the middle ages, and former leaper colonies became madhouses. In the Enlightenment, madness was defined as a medical problem and treated as such, with confinement as a therapeutic measure.
Foucault argues that the treatment of madness in each of these periods was a reflection of the time's dominant cultural and intellectual values. He also argues that political and economic considerations and ideas about the nature of madness shaped the treatment of the insane. Additionally, he argues that the treatment of Madness in Western culture has been characterized by a shifting balance between Reason and unreason, with Reason as a means of controlling and mastering the irrationality of madness. The book critically examines Reason and unreason's role in shaping our understanding of the world and our relationship with those different from us. He also points out that a lot of the treatment of the mentally unwell stems from the writings of Descartes. During the middle ages, people considered the insane part of the animal world, which was not treated with the same disdain as it is now. This shift in thinking happened during the transition to modernity. In light of the recent David Graeber book, The Dawn of Everything, I also wonder how much of these European thinkers' disdain for the natural world came from conversations with indigenous thinkers in the new world.
Artist unknown
To my followers on tumblr: please look into what is happening in Atlanta right now. The police murdered an environmental activist/police abolishionist. This state sanctioned murder should be alarming to everyone.
From Nassim Taleb's black Swan, to Bernoilli's fallacy by Aubrey Clayton, there is a growing movement against the frequentist school of statistics and the adherence to the normal distribution or bell curve. Today I learned that, along with other troubling eugenics style statistical measures like IQ, Adolphe Quetelet, who injected the bell curve into social science, also came up with the BMI scale. This type of egregious fatphobia is another example of the social ills brought to us by frequentist statistic.
Frequentist statistics is part and parcel with justifying scientific othering under the guise of mathematica rigor.
#statistic #abolishstatistics
It is your categorical imperative to not be a police officer.
That. Includes. Hiring.
That. Includes. Scheduling.
That. Includes. Firing.
That. Includes. Approving. Or. Denying. Social. Benefits.
One of the main differences between 2007, 2011 and 2023 is that now libs don't gaslight you when you point out that Republicans are rebranded Nazis.
Libs of yesteryear:
1. har har Goodwin's law.
2. Reference to George W. Bush dogwistles to facist dismissed as hyperbole.
3. The list goes on forever.
Maybe libs missed the forest thought the trees, but most of us did not.
A distribution of distributions of all the data in the world would be power law distributed with the power law distribution in the fatest tail. Just my hunch.